The Impact of Party Cues on Manual Coding of Political Texts

Do coders of political texts incorporate prior beliefs about parties’ issue stances into their coding decisions? We report results from a coding experiment in which ten coders were each given 200 statements on immigration that were extracted from election manifestos. Party labels in these statements were randomly assigned (including a control category without party cues). Coders were more likely to code a statement as pro-immigration if it was attributed to the Greens and less likely choose the anti-immigration category if it was attributed to the populist radical right. No effect was found for mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right. The results also suggest that coders resort to party cues as heuristics when faced with ambiguous policy statements.